"Goin' tuh Zar … de other side of far": New Worlds of Writing and Reading about the South

Abstract

"Goin' tuh Zar … de other side of far":New Worlds of Writing and Reading about the South Keith Cartwright The US South as we know it, with its larger national and transregional connections, was born of a long globalization process emergent from the wake of the Spanish colonial system and its British, French, and other variants of New World plantation economies built on conquest and slave labor. It was not until a 2002 symposium in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, however, that we could say that a new southern literary studies was fully launched to account for the US South's global scales. Its routings were mapped and established via Caribbean thinkers such as Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, and through novel kinships with Yoknapatawpha and the Okeechobee Muck expressed in fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Erna Brodber, among others. In spite of this awakening to a wider and even darker history writ large, the tone of early new southern studies was often celebratory in its reclamation of kinships across borders further south, and celebratory of new understandings of cosmopolitanism out of spaces long considered to be stagnant cultural backwaters. But as Martyn Bone insists in his recent book, much of what the US South shares with the larger Global South has come from its "fraught regional history of racialized labor: slavery, sharecropping, convict labor, and anti-unionism" (19). Bone reminds us too, that by around the time when H. L. Mencken was proclaiming the South to be a "Sahara of the Bozart" (1917)—a period when the rest of the nation was receiving an influx of immigration—only about two percent of the South's population was foreign-born (6), and the region's apartheid systems and low wages made for a stronger wall against immigration than any material wall that our current president is proposing. Still, by the end of [End Page 155] the Civil Rights Movement (1965) and the advent of the new world order of globalization (1980s), migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean had played a role in reshaping a transnational US South that by the start of the twenty-first century was again a "kind of contact zone between Global North and South" (13), setting off fears and reactions from our moment's vocal, clearly national white supremacy well beyond Dixie. Enter Bone's well-researched and very welcome intervention, Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (2018) from the University of Georgia's New Southern Studies Series. In this book, Bone examines fictional representations of "the labor exploitation that has recurred in shape-shifting fashion" in a region that, from its birth as region, has "been inextricably bound up with transnational trends and processes, especially the forced migration of African slavery" (xii). He examines writing that engages "the capitalist worldsystem that, circa 1981 or so, came to be called 'globalization'" (xvii), and offers, as he puts it, an "historicized and materialist attention to migration and labor" (20). Bone does well to make his cornerstone an initial chapter on Zora Neale Hurston and migrant labor. Subsequent chapters draw on patterns of exploitation of migrant labor in the South in ways that underscore underappreciated aspects of Hurston's acuity of vision. Most interesting is Bone's discussion of Hurston's unpublished typescript drafts of a proposed 1958 series of articles in the Miami Herald on migrant workers in Florida. He attends to patterns of black southern migrant labor circulating through Florida, registered in Jonah's Gourd Vine as well as in Their Eyes Were Watching God. But it is the focus on Bahamian workers in Their Eyes, and on Caribbean, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers in a remarkable unpublished article, "Florida's Migrant Worker," that shows Hurston's sensitivity to labor and to machineries of exploitation. In "Florida's Migrant Worker," Hurston asserts that as "the imagination, enterprise and daring of the growers grew, the migrant worker device grew with it until now in 1958, it has … evolved into a production machine, a device, an apparatus, an invention, under the supervision of both state and government" (49). By...